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SOME CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS • 
IN COLONIZATION 





BY 

ALLEYNE IRELAND 

Author of “ Tropical Colonization,” “The Anglo-Boer Conflict,” etc. 













Some Conditions of Success in Colonization. 

„ v 

By Alleyne Ireland, 


Author of “Tropical Colonization, 

V IEWED from the scientific stand¬ 
point the successful administra¬ 
tion of tropical dependencies pre¬ 
sents a number of difficulties which fall 
readily into two classes—the difficulties 
inherent in the nature of the local condi¬ 
tions and those incident to the imperfec¬ 
tion of the instruments employed; in 
other words, the difficulties involved on 
the one hand in the formulation, on the 
other hand in the execution of a policy. 

Unfortunately, however, mankind in 
general refuses absolutely to include 
government administration among those 
things which are to be considered 
proper subjects for scientific treatment. 
So, in setting out to examine some of the 
practical problems of tropical coloniza¬ 
tion we must realize at once that the sim¬ 
ple statement of the scientific difficulties 
of the task falls far short of expressing 
the magnitude of the work in hand. 

To the inherent difficulties must be 
added those which-are imported into the 
situation from outside, such, for in¬ 
stance, as the exigencies of party politics 
in the mother countrv, the influence like- 
ly to be exerted on the supreme legisla¬ 
ture by powerful commercial interests in 
the Sovereign State if a colonial meas¬ 
ure should appear to threaten those in r 
terests, the probable failure of the peo¬ 
ple of the Sovereign State to realize that 
political principles well adapted to the 
circumstances of the home country may 
be ill suited to the conditions of a trop¬ 
ical dependency, and the great danger in 
the case of a country having a written 
and somewhat inflexible constitution that 
a rigid adherence to the ideals of non- 
tropical theoretics may prevent the carry¬ 
ing out of the local administration along 
the lines of tropical opportunism. 

Within the scope of a brief article it is 
impossible to discuss the innumerable 
questions which arise in regard to what a 
Sovereign State may do in governing a 
tropical dependency—theoretical prop¬ 
ositions based ultimately on the fallacy 
that men were made for laws, not laws 


’’ “.The Anglo-Boer Conflict,” etc. 

for men—and I therefore pass to the 
practical question of what the experience 
of colonizing nations has shown must be 
done if a tropical dependency is to be 
successfully administered. 

Success, of course, can only be meas¬ 
ured in relation to the objects which it is 
sought to attain; and if this idea be fol¬ 
lowed out it leads us to the curious his¬ 
torical fact that in most instances col¬ 
onizing nations, until within recent years, 
have fallen into possession of their de¬ 
pendencies through circumstances en¬ 
tirely removed from any conscious na¬ 
tional objective. Thus Spain obtained 
her American colonies through the per¬ 
sonal insistence of Columbus and 
through the religious motives of Isa¬ 
bella’s confessor; Holland secured her 
East Indian possessions through the 
strong trading instincts of a small band 
of merchants; France came by her older 
colonies in much the same way; while 
England passed through her earlier pe¬ 
riod of imperialism, in the Elizabethan 
age, under the irritation of Spanish ar¬ 
rogance in the Western Hemisphere— 
which stimulated the spirit of adventure 
among the English people—and through 
the desire of religious freedom, which, as 
was to some extent true in the case of 
France and Holland, represented a re¬ 
volt against the extravagant pretentions / 
of the Romish Church in Europe. 

It is not until comparatively recent 
years that we find a recrudescence of im¬ 
perialism in a new form, an imperialism 
founded not, as formerly, on the indi¬ 
vidual initiative, but having its chief 
strength in the deliberate policy of na¬ 
tional governments. When it is remem¬ 
bered that twenty years ago Germany / 
had no colonies, that France had almost ' 
ceased to show any interest in her over¬ 
sea possessions, and that as late as 1886 
there existed in England a strong senti¬ 
ment in favor of letting the British col¬ 
onies fall away from the Empire, the fact 
that most questions of international im¬ 
portance to-day are colonial questions is 

wc. 


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sufficient evidence that colonization has 
entered a new stage, and one in which 
each European nation is guided by a def¬ 
inite aim. 

The colonial ambitions of France and 
Germany are mutually reactive, and as 
the colonial policy of each nation is conv 
plicated by a number of considerations 
belonging rather to European politics 
than to colonial affairs as such, littls 
good can be gained by attempting to es¬ 
timate the ratio between the anticipations 
and the realizations of French and Ger¬ 
man colonial policy. 

If allowance be made for the essential 
difference between a Republic and a 
Monarchy in regard to questions of ap¬ 
proach and treatment a close parallel ex¬ 
ists between the United States and Eng¬ 
land in reference to the basis of their co¬ 
lonial policies. 

One of the most important points of 
similarity is that neither the United 
States nor England is likely to be ham¬ 
pered in the general trend of her colonial 
policy by any fear of interference from 
outside. The United States is protected 
by her geographical situation, by her 
enormous and rapidly increasing popu¬ 
lation, and by her great natural re¬ 
sources ; England finds her security in 
her unquestioned command of the sea, 
in the devoted loyalty of her colonial sub¬ 
jects, in her insular position, and in the 
fact that she owns almost all the impor¬ 
tant coaling stations in the world; while 
each nation has a large credit to draw on 
in the belief very generally entertained 
on the Continent, that, alliance or no al¬ 
liance, the United States and England 
would probably stand together if any in¬ 
terference were attempted in the colonial 
policy of either. 

So, for the United States and England, 
the question is, in the first instance, What 
are the general aims we have in view in 
regard to our colonies? 

I do not presume to set down my opin¬ 
ions as to the objects aimed at by the 
United States; but I imagine they will be 
found ultimately not to differ very great¬ 
ly from those held in view by England, 
which I consider to be chiefly these: (a), 
trade; ( b ), the advancement of the gen¬ 
eral welfare of the various subject com¬ 
munities, under her flag; (c), an honest 
and efficient administration for each col¬ 
ony. 


As the colonial history of England 
covers nearly three centuries, and as her 
Empire to-day embraces territories in 
- every quarter of the globe and includes 
representatives of almost every race, 
creed and language, we may hope to find 
in the successes and failures of Eng¬ 
land’s colonial policy some indications 
of the conditions of success along the 
three main lines I have indicated above. 

England’s trade policy is one of abso¬ 
lute freedom from restrictions. There is 
not a single British colony to-day into 
which British goods can enter under con¬ 
ditions more favorable than those of¬ 
fered to the goods of every other nation. 
On the other hand, colonial goods have 
no preferential treatment in the home 
market.* This policy has been emi¬ 
nently successful, and its adoption has 
been followed by an enormous develop¬ 
ment of trade between the colonies and 
the mother country, as will be seen by the 
following figures: 

1858. 1898. 

Value of imports into United 

Kingdom from British colonies.$190,000,000 $497,000,000 
Value of exports from United 

Kingdom to British colonies.... 210,000,000 450,000,000 

If the experience of nations counts for 
anything we are justified in believing that 
the chief condition of success in coloniza¬ 
tion, as far as trade is concerned, is that 
no attempt must be made to artificially 
restrict commerce with a view to secur¬ 
ing an undue proportion for the Sov¬ 
ereign State. It has been repeatedly 
tried and has always failed. It is a bar¬ 
baric remnant of that old, exploded idea 
that colonies exist exclusively for the 
benefit of the Sovereign State—an‘idea 
which cost England her American col¬ 
onies, which killed Dutch trade in the 
East, and which leaves France to-day out 
of pocket to the extent of some $15,000,- 
000 a year on her colonial ventures. 

In dismissing the question of trade— 
and I have said little about the subject, 
because under the system of free trade 
all matters of international commerce 
speedily settle themselves, while if a be¬ 
ginning is made of legislative interfer¬ 
ence with the course of trade it is diffi- 

* I cannot deal here with the complicated question of 
what policy ought to be pursued by a Government in re¬ 
gard to the admission into the home market of products 
entering into competition with colonial imports when such 
products have received a bounty from some foreign Gov¬ 
ernment—a question which arises in regard to the admis¬ 
sion of bounty-fed beet sugar into British ports in compe¬ 
tition with colonial cane sugar. 






cult to see an end—I may quote the 
words of Sir John Seeley on the point: 

“ Commerce in itself may favor peace,” he 
says in his Expansion of England, “ but 
when commerce is artificially shut out by a 
decree of government from some promising 
territory, then commerce just as naturally 
favors war. We know what the old colonial 
system was . . . the object of each nation 

was now to increase its trade not by waiting 
on the wants of mankind, but by a wholly dif¬ 
ferent method—namely, by getting exclusive 
possession of some rich tract in the New 
World. Now whatever may be the natural op¬ 
position between the spirit of trade and the 
spirit of war, trade pursued in this method is 
almost identical with war, and can hardly fail 
to lead to war.” 

The advancement of the general wel¬ 
fare of a nation’s colonies must depend 
on the general attitude of the govern¬ 
ment of the Sovereign State in reference 
to colonial affairs and on the nature and 
condition of the working machinery of 
the colonial office. 

Here the thing to be desired above all 
else is continuity of policy. It may be 
doubted whether any single influence, 
outside those exerted by physical en¬ 
vironment, has done more to render the 
tropical man unfit for self-government 
than the kaleidoscopic change of condi¬ 
tions involved in the rapid succession of 
rulers which has marked the history of 
tropical countries from the earliest times 
and had degraded a fine habit of personal 
loyalty into mere undiscriminating sub¬ 
serviency. The bare physical duration 
of the Queen’s reign has done more for 
British influence in India than all the bat¬ 
tles that have been fought in the Pen¬ 
insula since Job Charnock sailed up the 
Hugh. 

The first desire of every person occu¬ 
pying a position of dependence, whether 
of a personal nature as in the case of a 
child, of a political nature as in the case 
of a colonist, or of a business nature as in 
the case of a clerk, is that an adjustment 
to certain general permanent conditions 
shall be made easy. If the rules and or¬ 
ders and methods are changed from 
time to time the position becomes more 
intolerable than if a regime more difficult 
and severe in itself existed permanently. 

Vacillation has been at the bottom of 
most of England’s colonial difficulties'. It 
inscribed the death of Gordon on one of 
the darkest pages of English history; it 
made Omdurman necessary; and, as an 


historic cause, went far toward render¬ 
ing the present South African war in¬ 
evitable, after having written “ Majuba ’' 
for the entertainment of the Boers and 
“ Isandhlwana ” for the satisfaction of 
the Zulus. 

In these instances the evils of a vacil¬ 
lating policy are so obvious that to-day 
there is little likelihood of disaster in 
similar directions from the same causes, 
as the least likely place for a railroad ac¬ 
cident is its most dangerous curve; but in 
matters of internal government and of 
the relations between a colony and the 
mother country, where the injury is not 
so readily perceptible, there is a constant 
danger that a sudden change of policy, or 
a failure to declare a policy, may produce 
an amount of impatience with the home 
control entirely out of proportion to the 
significance of the matter in hand, and 
the more dangerous in that it may lie 
dormant for years before finding its out¬ 
let in action. 

No country can show a more miser¬ 
able record of patch-quilt colonial policy 
than England; but fortunately for the 
past ten or fifteen years and more espe¬ 
cially during the past five years, since 
Mr. Chamberlain became Colonial Sec¬ 
retary, colonial affairs have been con¬ 
ducted under the influence of clear and 
definite principles. 

By the application of one of these prin¬ 
ciples, namely, that where self-govern¬ 
ment—that is, complete local control of 
internal affairs—is possible, having in 
view th^ interests of the general commu¬ 
nity, it shall be extended to a colony; all 
the British colonies fall into one of two 
classes: (I) The self-governing colonies; 
(2) those which are governed more or 
less directly from England. It is inter¬ 
esting to note in this connection that each 
self-governing colony lies outside the 
tropics. 

By the application of another princi¬ 
ple, that when complete local self-gov¬ 
ernment is impossible as near an ap¬ 
proach to it shall be granted as is con¬ 
sistent with a certain standard of good 
government, the tropical colonies fall into 
two classes: (1) Those having repre¬ 
sentative institutions empowered to pass 
legislative and fiscal measures, subject to 
the final approval of the colonial office; 
(2), those which have no representative 
ihstitutions, but are governed directly 


under the authority of the colonial of¬ 
fice. 

Another useful principle which may, I 
think, be deduced from the conduct of 
the colonial office is that good govern¬ 
ment as such is better than self-govern¬ 
ment as such, and that it is therefore 
foolish to deliberately hand over a colony 
to bad government simply for the sake 
of being able to say that it enjoys* * self- 
government. 

Indications are not wanting that the 
colonial office is growing to a belief that 
representative institutions are not well 
suited to the conditions prevailing in 
tropical colonies; and with this opinion, 
after a residence of a number of years in 
tropical colonies under both forms of 
government, I am inclined to concur. 

The British colonial office is consti¬ 
tuted in such a way that the successful 
regulation of local affairs in the smaller, 
tropical colonies is in most cases as¬ 
sured. With the exception of the Sec¬ 
retary of State for the Colonies and the 
Parliamentary Under-Secretary the staff 
of the colonial office is permanent. Each 
colony must furnish the colonial office, 
at regular intervals, with the most mi¬ 
nute accounts of all its internal affairs; * 
and the continuance of this system 
for years has placed in the colonial of¬ 
fice library an immense mass of detailed 
information about each dependency. The 
colonial office has four assistant under¬ 
secretaries, each of whom has charge of 
some particular branch of colonial af¬ 
fairs, and all the work of the office is di¬ 
vided between seven sets of departmental 
clerks, each set handling one of the fol¬ 
lowing distinct branches: North Ameri¬ 
can and Australasian Colonies, West In¬ 
dian Colonies, Eastern Colonies, South 
African Colonies, West African Colo¬ 
nies ; General and Financial Affairs and 
Accounts. 

Nothing can better insure the general 
welfare of a dependency than the exist¬ 
ence in the Sovereign State of a colonial 
office provided with an ample staff of 
permanent officials having a knowledge 
of the history, politics and economics of 
colonization. To this department should 


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* Some idea of the minuteness of these records may be 
gained from the fact that in reporting to the colonial 
office the effects of the hurricane of Sept, n, 1898 , the 
colonial engineer of St Lucia, in the West Indies, reports 
damage to the extent of 24 cents to the shutters on one of 
the government buildings. (C .9205 of 1899 , p. 87 .). 


be attached a special library containing, 
in addition to all the official reports of lo¬ 
cal governors, collectors, medical of¬ 
ficers, etc., files of the principal newspa¬ 
pers published in the dependencies and a 
copy of every book published about each 
dependency, in whatever language. 

In order to secure an efficient, honest 
and inexpensive administration for a co¬ 
lonial dependency two things are neces¬ 
sary—the right method and the right 
men. If only one of those two can be 
had it is better to have the right men, 
since successful administration in the 
tropics is largely a question of the per¬ 
sonal qualities of the civil servants. 

Space does not admit a minute refer¬ 
ence to the conditions of success in re¬ 
gard to method, and I give therefore only 
a few of the most obvious ones: 

(1) Complete and legally fixed re¬ 
sponsibility of the heads of departments 
to the Governor and finally to the co¬ 
lonial office. 

(2) The presentation to the Governor 
of exhaustive annual reports by the 
heads of departments on the work done 
and the expenditure incurred during the 
fiscal year. 

(3) The presentation to the Governor, 
for transmission to the colonial office, of 
confidential reports by the heads of de¬ 
partments on the conduct and ability of 
each subordinate official. 

(4) A uniform system of accounting. 

(5) A thorough system of auditing. 
An excellent way of arranging this is to 
allow one department to audit the books 
of another, an arbitrary change being ef¬ 
fected every few months so that no one 
would know for any length of time in ad¬ 
vance who was to audit his books. 

(6) A monthly accounting to the treas¬ 
ury, with an actual delivery of cash bal¬ 
ances, from each person receiving money 
in connection with the judicial, supply, or 
revenue departments. 

The securing of the right men for a co¬ 
lonial civil service is a difficult task, even 
if the rules of selection most clearly nec¬ 
essary are strictly observed. The serv¬ 
ice must be made sufficiently attractive 
to divert the best youth of the country 
from the reasonable prospects of success 
in business careers. Having, by com¬ 
petitive examination, selected the most 
competent men who have offered them¬ 
selves, they must be assured of the per- 



manent occupation 
ing good behavior, 
for two reasons; in the absent 
prospect of a permanent position the 
best men would not offer themselves for 
examination, and, even if the uncertainty 
of tenure did not operate as a deterrent, 
the appointee would only begin to get a 
real hold over the natives after some 
years of residence among them, and 
his usefulness would therefore begin 
about the time his tenure of office ended. 

These conditions are beyond all ques¬ 
tion or dispute absolutely necessary; but 
even with these conditions granted a co¬ 
lonial civil service may fall far short of 
any high standard of usefulness and ef¬ 
ficiency, for certain qualities are indis¬ 
pensable which cannot be secured by 
competitive examinations. The colonial 
civil servant must be a gentleman, in the 
best sense of the word; he must be pre¬ 
pared to give up everything for the sake 
of his work; he must so conduct himself 
in his private as well as in his official life 
as to secure the respect and, if possible, 
the affection of the people he governs; he 
must enjoy the earnest conviction that his 
personal honor is involved in the dis¬ 
charge of each daily task; he must never 
forget that whether in health or sickness 
or with the prospect before him of a vio¬ 
lent death his first concern must be to up¬ 
hold by his actions the dignity of the 
nation he represents. 

England has been able to establish 




vhat is generally admitted to be the best 
Colonial service the world has ever seen. 
jHer form of government has to no small 
extent contributed to this success, for, 
after all, as men are constituted, no 
stronger appeal can be made than to the 
sense of loyalty and obligation to the 
person of a Sovereign. We are accus¬ 
tomed to speak of titles as mere senseless 
baubles; but it may be doubted whether 
in sending out a man to govern a de¬ 
pendency, with instructions that he is not 
to seek to make money out of it, the na¬ 
tion which can offer a Reward for faith¬ 
ful service which is not in the form of a 
money compensation has -not an advan¬ 
tage over a nation which says, “ Money 
you must not seek, but if you rule well 
the only reward I can offer you is 
money.” 

No one who is at all familiar with the 
United States can doubt for a moment 
that there are to be found among Amer¬ 
icans men as capable and honest and as 
much inspired by high ideals as are those 
who are devoting their lives to the cause 
of good government in the British col¬ 
onies ; the only question is whether these 
men are the ones on whom the United 
States will call to administer those terri¬ 
tories which the strange chances of in¬ 
ternational affairs have placed under the 
protection of the Stars and Stripes; and 
it is a question which must be answered 
not by the present writer, but by the 
American people. 

Concord, Mass. \ 


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